Columbus marketing playbook: This Proposal Has Closed $350k+ in Agency Sales (Full Walkthrough)

Kind: captions Language: en Hey there, my name is Andy. You stumbled across my channel where I teach you in public everything I'm doing to build a million dollar a month marketing services community empire. We're not there yet. Uh last month the business generated $26,000 topline. And if this is your first time to the channel, I run a web and SEO studio for healthcare brands called MMG Design. I have a podcast called Marketing by Design where I interview thought leaders in healthcare, B2B, and beyond. And I also have a in-person job board marketing mastermind events community for marketers called the Columbus Marketing Organization. Sorry, my brain is fried today, guys. I want to record this to take you inside the scenes here. Our normal format is we do a little bit of live lead genen. I show you my pipeline, how I'm generating leads, how I'm moving the business forward. Then I'll move on to some building and strategizing in public. Then we'll go on to updates and growth stats. And I will show you guys how I track all of my platforms, products, and content motions that I'm trying to grow. So I want to share with you guys today while I do all of these of course I want to show you guys take you inside my proposal writing process that is sensitive client information but what I've been using recently has been using AI to really streamline my proposal making process. I have an entire uh Figma board and you would think that using Figma for proposals would be a less than ideal solution. But what I found is that with the MCP and using codec, you can actually design and update UIs and if you have default case studies across multiple brands, it can be really helpful for repeating formats. So here is the shebang. I know that you and I have I told you guys about how we handle the sales process. So I'll kind of go through how this usually works for us. So we have a booked call and obviously a lot goes on here beforehand. There's customer interest, there's lead qualification depending on where they came from with their referral or they booked organically. I will say this week alone we have had three people book calls finding us from AI search and I have this verified and recorded on camera directly asking them how they found us. Um yeah so booking calls so on the call you qualify them. Ideally, if you have all the other metrics in place like a prospect finds you online, you have pricing on your website already, they can internally qualify and then you kind of take that out to uh you kind of take care of that and automate that process. But after qualification, you have follow-up. So on this sales call, what you'll tell them is, okay, I'm going to send you a proposal on this date exactly. Do you want to get another call on the schedule for XYZ date after you've had time to review it? So, you lay out all these next steps and it makes the decision phase obvious because there's nothing else left to do at that point. There's no, "Oh, I should check back in on them or hey, just checking an email." If you follow this process, you will at least get to the answer quicker. And that's really all you want. best off sales is is giving the prospect all the information they need in order to make an educated validated decision. So, okay, this week I had two calls and I have a call scheduled with both of them again next week. I have told them, hey, by the end of this week, you will you will receive a proposal. Within that proposal will be details about what we talked about, our process, our recommendations, a short video, case studies, pricing, and timelines. So they know they're expecting this and we will be meeting again to go over every line of it. This is the proposal format that I traditionally follow here in Figma. I just have these in as PDFs. I have a customized overview and I'll go through this. This proposal, by the way, has closed me over $100,000 in website projects. So that's probably the hook I'll use for this video. But uh leading with a just these and sometimes I'll even shorten this down. Like I might not even include this page right here of the plan. But a couple things that you're trying to express in this testimonial that you understood the information that you talked about on the first call. That is what this first slide is for. It's customized. It's clear. And it shows that you're paying attention. That's why on the onboarding call, if you're recording it, you're taking a transcript. You ask them, "What does success look like for this project?" You literally restate that to them in this first slide here. Then you move on to the plan. So the simplified version of how you tackle it. Then you ask, "Have we done this before? Of course we have." And then three relevant case studies. Sometimes I'll swap this out depending on the brand. Then you go into the technical side. I will definitely be cutting this for this proposal. Detailed overview of the phases about us clear transparent pricing and then next steps to get started making it seem incredibly easy. You know what? Because it is. So you have all of your information there and then thank you. Customizing it. So for this proposal here, what I will do is I will trim the fat on actually I'll keep all these cuz this is a larger product or larger project. And what I will do instead is I will go back to whisperflow which is our notetaker. I will find the notes from that call. Uh this one right here. I will say transcript uh copy said transcript. I will head over to codeex. Hey, I just pasted in the transcript from the latest discovery call I had with a prospect. What I want you to do is head into this Figma file here. And I have through slides 24 through end kind of that second row there on the uh on the PDFs. Don't ignore the top rows, the second row of slides. I want you to first respond in chat. verified that you're connected to Figma and that MCP, but I want you to respond in chat with how you would customize this proposal given the context of the discovery call that I just had with Anna and Spar. Hit on what they responded best to and fit it within the format of the existing second PDF that I've shared. Does all this make sense? Great. So, now let's that that's cooking there. I'm going to lay out a plan for this video. So, number one, we're going to start with proposal follow-ups. Additionally, when I have this, I will host it as a PDF link and I will send it in an email to them with a short little walkthrough video like this kind of explaining, hey, love chatting with you guys yesterday. This is just a quick little, as promised, just sending over this PDF copy of the proposal for you to share with leadership internally. Talks about all the boring stuff, pricing, technical details, scope, timelines, and things like that. I didn't want to bore with you guys with that on the call. If you guys have any questions to fill in the gaps on this, just shoot me a message. Um, and we have our call reserved next week to address those questions face to face. Otherwise, I'll see you guys then. Clearly, setting next next steps and expectations. Another little hack here. A lot of meeting links to use Google calendar will allow you to include resource links. So, I use notion calendar. This is where we have that meeting scheduled. I will include the links and attachments. I'll put the link to that proposal in there and put in the description. Hey, attach the proposal link in here for us to review on our call. Boom. Uh, it combi that combined with this slide right here makes it very clear what next steps are. It just it makes it seem easy to them. They know exactly where they know exactly what next steps are. Just makes it simple. So, I'm going to check in with my friend CEX here. Yes, that makes sense. I've MCP and confirmed access to the proposal frame at the supplied link. Lead with their credibility. Boom. I use slides to the second PDF to row a working range and retain the existing DEX layout system. Amazing. Okay, sounds perfect. Make sure that you don't change any fonts or anything like that. Keep the same fonts and brand guidelines that are in there. Keep the text about the same length so that there's no text breaking. And otherwise, go ahead and get to work. And the reason why this works so well is obviously I will go in and proofread this. But it's on brand. It is personalized. It has the client's name in there. And they're thinking, "Oh man, I never recommend that you guys go in and create something like this from scratch more than once." I have I have the proposal templates that I used for that I have the other couple hundred thousand dollars of I originally hosted on a tool called Moxy which I just unsubscribed from today ironically because I don't need it anymore but it is a it allows you to create online invoices and PDFs and proposals and scopes of work as well. So, if I look at my lifetime sales here within Moxy, you can see I have, let's do a alltime. I do all time. I guess not. Last year 172,000, this year 74,000. That's still not all of them, but my highest the proposals that this is why I don't like lead magnets that say, oh, my highest converting proposal format or things like that because in actuality, it's not the proposal in and of itself that gets you to work. Ideally, it supports it and it reinforces the trust that you've already built on the sales call, but that's what the sales call for to establish your expertise and talk to them like a human. So, I'm not sold on the idea that that the proposal in and of itself is how you win work. Um, in my mind, it just reinforces what is already bound to be closed. As you can see, it's working. And if we go over to Figma here, we'll be able to see it update here in live time. Uh, just to make sure that it's going over smoothly. I will refresh here. Uh, so yeah, while that's cooking, I'm going to go back to our lead genen. Like I said, I was going to plan out this video a little bit better, but if you go back to Excalibur, uh, proposal follow-ups, then we're going to do live region. And I'm going to be focusing on LinkedIn here specifically, so you guys can I've had a lot of people asked how I do LinkedIn follow-ups. cander and then we will close with growth stats which is I've been using a tool called ship studio to update my brand stats dashboard stats boom okay uh ship studio publish push done preview it here the local host version is not what I want okay live okay we're in retro mode great daily actions branch stats this should be updated. Refresh. Some reason I don't know why it's remarkably frustrating how I was doing this. Um, yeah, I'll go in and manually log these just so I can get a accountability metric, which is important. So, I'll do that there at the end. Track some of our growth stats. Becca, I saw you respond to one of Norah's posts and I saw that you were local also. Smiley face. Love connecting with local marketers as well. comment on our age. Fantastic. Talk like a human meeting tomorrow there. Hey, would you like would you like to get a walk and talk on the bus before the weather starts getting chilly? Boom. Absolutely. I would absolutely love to period. Name a time and day next week do Fridays usually work well for me. Location in the coming weeks and I'll make it happen. Thumbs up emoji. Enthusiasm as a moat. Emily Barnhard. Hi Andy. I'm looking for a graphic design job and would love to connect with you. I have seen your post and I'm hoping we can work together. Absolutely. I actually have a lead for her potentially. Hey Emily, exclamation point. Thank you so much for reaching out and I'm so glad to be connected. Smiley face emoji. I would love to refer you dot dot dot. Let me send a message to Lori L a U R I E and see if they still need help. Exclamation point. I did refer one designer to her already, but she could be in the market. She still could be looking period. Question colon, do you do freelance work? Wow, idiot. You do freelance work. Boom. Making friends. She could very well be a client of the Columbus marketing organization. Something else I want to talk about is refining my offer. So, right now everything Oh, you right now everything lives at this URL. Job board events community built for ambitious market in the Columbus learn and grow with peers at your stage and one to two steps ahead of you in their journey. I need to firm up this offer right now. It's a I I am taking applications to this tally form right here, but I need to firm up the identity and positioning of what this is. A lot of you guys watch through this channel and just hopefully learn transparently from what I share on here. But if you guys are watching and you want to know like what would be the highest value activities that would would it be a community? Would you like to learn from other CMOs and people here locally that are crushing it that I can introduce you to? That would be a fantastic question that I I need to firm up. Would it be a school community, a circle community, a Slack channel? Uh need to firm that up. Haven't done it. need to do that uh firm up the offer and the proof of value there while we'll check on ah please. How do I make these fonts available to the Figma session? That is really annoying. Perhaps I can just attach them here and now I have them downloaded locally. If I just uploaded them to this chat, would you be able to use them from here? Love admin. We absolutely love admin. God. Great. Okay. Well, if I look here, it would appear as if the fonts are already loaded in there because there they are. Let's go to sources, folders, admin. No, she does not get a full seat. Cancel my down register. Cancel. Oh, that's probably not going to fix it, but I don't want to be paying Figma every month here. I just have to update it manually no matter how much it sucks and then it'll change the fonts afterwards. Okay. Well, I'm opening the fonts within the Figma desktop app, so I'm not sure what your issue is. Um, I'm guessing you're using the online version, and that's why it's causing an issue. Go ahead and disregard the fonts. Just use enter for everything, and I'll go ahead and change them all afterwards. But go ahead and upload the copy with prior instructions and edit. Okie dokie. While we do that, I actually have another another proposal to fill out. This one will be much lighter weight and for a smaller project. So, this one's just for 3K and not the full shebang um 35K. This one, this one will be for 35K. This one starting at numero 36 will be for much less. And I will definitely scope it down here to only be these. Boom. Okay. So, this would be enterprise. It should not be. Oh, yeah. Oh my gosh. I'm not sure if you guys were able to see that. That is another vibe coded creation of mine. Um, I apologize deeply. I built a desktop app that every 30 said 90 minutes right now because I'm being lazy. Every 30 minutes a mini David Gogggins will pop on my screen and prompt me to do exercise and it logs all of my history. And I've been bad about skipping them today, but yeah. So, that's fun. I hope you guys did not see that, but if you did, I hope you I hope you enjoyed that. Oh my. Okay. Hey, I think I said 35,000 on the change that to 35,000. Okay. Looks like it drafted the first copy here. Ergonomics. Okay. A couple gaps we need to fill in here. Okay. A few things we need to update. The client is called ergonomic consultants. So, change the name and the footers to be that. Um, change the name. Enterprise website rebuild does not sound sound good. be more tailored to what their exact needs were and the way that they uh and the things that they valued really speaking to those points. Yeah, that actually all looks pretty good. Just update the name of the company to be ergonomic consultants and the date to be September 2026. Pretty good job there. Impress. Now for the second one here. Wow, it changed our logo too. Damn, that's unfortunate. Anyway, okay. We're getting bombarded here on LinkedIn. Fantastic. Okay. Well, we're recording a webinar, guys. Looking forward to that. Um, Becca, I'm excited to see her land this new role. It's been a great week over here. How's yours? I should have asked, how long you been in Columbus? That would have been better question to ask. Never ask. Hey, how's your week been? Great. All right. Wow. Oh, it is remarkably quick website and portal is trust and growth website rebuild proposal. Okay, now let me let you guys in on the sauce for Figma. So now we will just commandclick on all of these and then change the fonts here in li and change fonts here in live time. Uh, watch me do such a thing. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Just because Figma couldn't do it on its own. Okay, bummer. And change our brand font, which is test tine. Now, just a little bit of refactoring that we'll have to do. Everything else turned out pretty good there. Six weeks, six phases. Change this to be technical foundation. Lovely, lovely. Change these to be a slightly smaller font size. Fortunately, we'll remove this case study because team at fibbricks is closing. Come on now. Really with this? Damn, that's frustrating. Frustrating behavior from you. The hell is going on here, guys? Dude, this is freaking infuriating. Why do I bother? And love being a per being a perfectionist. Oh, I'm sorry, guys. Right as I say, it's not worth it to customize a proposal. Here I am just eating my words, of course. Great. Um, so let's see. Enterprise credibility marketing team control compliance software demo access. Not sure I want to clear the software. remove mentions of the software demo access and focus more so on the value prop of research and a custom scoped migration to retain SEO authority. Kind of just steering it in the right direction there. What I do want to say is we also have another proposal that is going to be more lighter weight by design. And I actually have a case study from the client that she referred to us that I want to include as the main main one there because that's the client that referred us. So basically putting in the testimonial from the client that referred us to them as the one that I feature in there and I believe that I have it here somewhere. If I go to testimonials settings sort CMS testimonials forward hide on testimonial slider no selected domains and then it should appear and then I'll just take a screenshot of it. Sorry if you guys are losing context as to what I'm doing here, but essentially I want to get Kevin's testimonial to include on the website and I need his testimonial to appear here which I don't know how to do with web flow and change this filters. Great. It would appear as if I don't know what the hell I'm doing and my own expertise, which is just fantastic to share with you all even though I do know what I'm doing and it's just killing me that it doesn't know. So, refresh and see if it was just a CM CMS issue. No, I just just completely lost. Hang on, bro. Am I cooked right now? Am I actually cooked? I just might be. Go to services healthcare website design. Here we go. This is how we do it. That's why cuz the damn thing ain't in there and he doesn't have the headsh shot cut out. Frick. Okay, whatever. I'll just use this design just gets it. Hi guys. I love that you love me. Research positioning research and thought transform credibility as price trust informs buying decisions. I want to give me a paragraph of copy that I could use for a custom scope migration plan. They went bu they went buoup for this expert migration. Okay, let's make these a bit make this look a little bit better, shall we? And also make it test medium configure. Make it a little bit bigger. Make it a little bit bigger. Okay, we don't want caps. And of course, you wouldn't do it right on the first time. You snake. You are going to turn my hair gray. Just tighten the gaps here. Right. Andy, you are a special person. Anyway, two case studies for this one. Technical foundation. Let's make this make these look a little bit cleaner here. We love that. Looking great. Definitely make that multi- lines here. Here. The gist of what I want to get out here is that the reason that I'm not spending an entire day on this because they haven't paid us any money yet. And that's really the contradiction when it comes to service business digital services businesses is that this is just scoped work and this is an enterprise company and obviously they can afford this. So, you know, there is a time and place for free work. I've made a video in the past of why it's a good idea to do free work because I do believe there is a time and a place for it. Copy image E3 consulting. Obviously have to replace our freaking logo to lovely proposal. This looks a little coded. So I just want to update this to be zero also not be all caps and also be completely white. And last thing fix our logo which AI just felt compelled to change for some dumbass reason. Amazing testimonials. Boom. One, two, three. Bastard head. Make me lose all my goddamn credibility. One final review. Just make sure I'm not going nuts. All right, I think we are good as gold now. So, that take that took me what? 20 minutes. Now, we're going to update all of these as PDFs. And what the flying freak just happened there? Couldn't tell you. Uh, probably because I changed the color of the last thing without hovering off of it here. So, move this right here. Hover on and update. Export 12 layers. Fantastic. It's going to be a big one. Go to MMG to within every client. I create a folder for every single client within this one master Google Drive folder. If you guys do not have the Google Tribe desktop app, highly recommend that you get that immediately. But what am I even doing? Ergonomic consultants. Boom. New folder proposal. I go to I love PDF.com. Oh, incorrect. PDF combiner. All of our lovely PDFs here. Make sure that they are in order. If this got out of order, I'm going to be a little a little bit upset. Yes, it did get out of order. It's all effed up and out of order. Why would it not be? Why would it not be? Yes, we love this. Fantastico. I can't remember a project. What order did I have it in? Our project. God. God. I promise you I've done this before. This is just a impressive bad performance here. I apologize to you guys. Then after the case studies, then we go into thisation. Six weeks, six phases. your web partners pricing. Get started. I'm cool with that. Merge PDF download. Um, Ergonomic Consultants XMG Studio 41 megabytes. That's just damn lovely. But the way this is great, guys, is if we pull this up in preview, we will actually retain our showcases service verticals. Should be more than three. That's a hang on. Made another oopsie. showcases and great amazing. Okay, I'm actually a lot more confident in that now than that I actually read it. Uh, okay. So, that is what I'm going to do. Meanwhile, I'm going to get started on the next one. This the next one is just for a 3K project. Um, like I said, there are referrals, so I'm not going to spend nearly as much time customizing this or making it as hight touch. Uh, in fact, I normally for a 3K project, I wouldn't even wouldn't even write a proposal, but I just need some documentation for them to have on hand. I need to go back here, select PDF files and remerge everything because I like to do things twice. Fantastic. How about I just, by the way, my my hands are absolutely screwed. It's 8:00 at night with this here. Our project getting started is the last one. Foundation comes after that. We hold ourselves too. Your web partners pricing six week six phases that move that there foundation. Six weeks, six phases. Lovely, lovely. I absolutely love this. Well, I was about to flex to you guys how fast my proposal process is and I just uh fumbled the bag on the execution side of it. So you can see I hope you guys have taken away the process of this in terms of how quick it actually can be if you have your systems in